Heraclea

The thing that makes this game uniquely beautiful and relaxing is that you can team up with a group of random players and take on just about anything it can throw at you. No equipment repair costs, no corpse walks, none of the other drama generators that mar other games, no trinity (no prima donna tanks or healers as a result), no need to watch for That Red Light or wonder What Phase is This, no boss fight choreography to learn. No failure. You're superheroes. (Comic books where the superheroes fail to save the world are pretentious and bad.) Nothing should ever change this. It's what makes this game better than its competitors.

Part of the problem is that This Sort of Thing does not scale well. Giving minions unresisted mezz (all of Night Ward) or strong debuffs (kinetic Tsoo) is almost tolerable when it's just a regular solo spawn. Add players and larger spawns and such mobs quickly become unplayable. You get hit with multiple kinetic debuffs, you get repeatedly blinded, confused, feared, or Hold stacked, and you may as well get up and make a sandwich. Someone else will have to play through this. You can't. Likewise, one of the problem with the blue patches is scale. Someone above mentioned that when they attempted to solo the TF there were only one or two active at a time. With a team of eight they may cover most of the territory where the mobs are.

If I find myself having difficulty seeing what is going on in a fight, that's a cue to turn the particles way down. I have to remember to turn them back up, because I base edit and need to see what others will see.

From my perspective the later added content seems very different. You get those untankable mobs in Night Ward, worse even than Carnies or Vanguard if your purpose is to take point and attract aggro. The same is true of kinetic Tsoo in New Dark Astoria. Or those missions filled with nothing but Seers in Praetoria: levelling through that stuff once, nine years ago, was quite enough. The biggest flaw of this sort of thing is that it makes having a team a liability; the material is inherently anti-social and solo only. You do not want more mobs on this stuff. You do not want bosses. Soloing at +0/1 is the only way to go. It defeats the social purpose of the game. To me, one of the points of this sort of thing seems to be 'shut up and play your controller'. It just might be that control heavy teams able to fear, confuse, or hold the mobs before they can do the same to you are the only kinds of teams this material might be fun to play on. So yes, a whole lot of the later added material seems specifically designed to devalue melee ATs, make tanking impossible, bypass both defense and resistance, and spam unresisted mezz. The Apex TF is one of the worst offenders because it introduces the sort of mechanic that has tended to kill my interest in other MMOs. This game is better off without that sort of thing.

If that's the case, it may be changed on Pineapple without being changed yet on Live.

Might be a bit of overkill there b/c Radiation has solid +regen buffs and a relatively fast self heal. But you're probably going to be quite tough.

I suspect it relates to the fact that Quills is a primary power while Icicles is a secondary.

I have the powers on my TW/WP scrapper. I realized very early that the character needed all the end help she could get.

The profusion of these mechanics (and the resulting 'tank or go home' mentality and the devaluation of melee DPS) is one of the main causes of my abandoning other MMOs. Seeing it pop up here is the camel's nose under the tent.

This is the sort of thing that sends people to immersion breaking VOIP chat in other games. Its absence in most of the content is one of the glories of this game. If nothing else, it would help to have useful maps in stuff like this.

Weird Al Yankovic - Mission Statement

My God, this is horrible, terribly unfair to all the melee classes, and to Brutes in particular. The Blue Flames mechanic is constantly forcing you to move away from the mob you had been engaging. It makes the holding of aggro consistently, especially against more than one mob, impossible. It renders taunt auras useless. It takes the class dependent on Fury generation completely out of the game. It is typical of the devaluation of melee ATs and melee defense sets that characterizes a lot of the later added content. This is one of the worst offenders there. It is generic MMO garbage that never should have been brought here. One thing that made this game so much better than its competition is the absence of this kind of 'stop what you're doing and go stand somewhere else' mechanic. It never should have been brought here. Of course, it also shares the flaws typical of a lot of the later added content: useless, uninformative, or missing maps; unclear mission goals; moving goalposts. This stuff is simply not very well written.

The one good thing about Regen is that it effectively has no holes, because it is almost completely indifferent to the type or location of incoming damage. Psionic damage, toxic damage, untyped damage, it's all just damage to the Regen player. I have a regen scrapper currently sitting at 46, absolutely no hurry to get to 50, because the main thing I do with the character is run stuff like Synapse or Moonfire. Thanks to Quick Recovery she plays like a dream in those TFs. She earns merits that are spent on things my other characters want, and she earns valuable lowbie set recipes like Kinetic Combat and Impervious Skin. I do not take Fighting pool on the character like I do with most melees; for her Tough and Weave would be lipstick on a pig. She doesn't start from a level of defense or S/L resistance that would make what they add pointful, And as Galaxy Brain mentioned, people take the set because it says 'regeneration' and that's a familiar comic superhero trope, like 'Invulnerability' or 'Super Strength'. These may not in fact be the best choices for building the sort of character you have in mind, but the appeal of 'Willpower' or 'Bio Armor' is less obvious. It also has the advantage of not turning your character into a rock monster, a human light show, or Pigpen. I think the best thing to do to make Regen viable in endgame is to keep it unique. Give it substantial, softcapped at the default slot, resistance to just about all debuffs: practical immunity to -recharge, -tohit, -defense, -resist, and the like. It's a one trick pony; let it use its one trick. Make it immune to Confused and Terrorized while you're at it: that's fortunately rare but it makes the content where it happens off limits to most melee defensive sets.

Radiation primary gets a power that heals teammates as well. My /Rad scrapper is working on her second healing badge, so it's useful for that healing tanker you always wanted. Right now I'd say that Rad is in the best place for the resistance-first sets, it's easy to softcap Toxic and Energy damage as well as Smashing/Lethal, and that's useful across the board. The thing about Invulnerability is that while it is easy to softcap defenses on paper, you don't have to; what you need is to hit the softcap with one mob in range. Heraclea is very close to that (with one mob she's around 42% s/l) and that's good enough for all practical purposes.

I often take the pool on characters that don't rely on stuff like damage or taunt auras and that don't have stealth powers in their primaries or secondaries. It can't be used at all if you are running something like Hide or Field Operative, so it just isn't available to make those powers more effective. I noticed this on a regen scrapper that has both Invisibility and Stealth. No taunt aura there, so the pool is an option for the character. After the stealth changes there seemed to be no real difference in the PvE function of the two powers. Either of them, in combination with a stealth IO in Sprint, are good enough to get past most normal mobs. Neither of them are good enough to get past mobs with +perception. So Invisibility seems redundant on the character and I probably will burn a respec to get rid of it and grab something else. Perhaps just making them cumulative with other kinds of stealth in PvE may be the way to go here. Make them runnable concurrently and stacking; make using them improve Hide and similar powers as well.

David Gilmour - There's No Way Out of Here

Jim Carroll - City Drops Into the Night

Pentangle - A Maid that's Deep In Love

My video card is nowhere near that new (GTX 950) but the gamma feature works on it as well. A quirk of high end Nvidia cards?

They don't seem to be different enough now to justify having two powers that are now so very similar that it hardly seems justifiable to take both powers from the same pool. After the stealth changes, basically Invisibility is a very slightly more robust version of Stealth, at least in PvE. Stealth no longer slows you. Invisibility no longer puts you in 'only affect self' mode. Invisibility gives you more defense than Stealth does; in either case that mostly goes away when you attack. Neither Stealth nor Invisibility are themselves enough to get you past ordinary mobs if you're forced into close proximity at a door. They both are good enough in that situation in the case where you also have a Stealth IO in Sprint, Combat Jumping, or some other travel power. Neither will still be enough when confronted with mobs that have +perception like Rikti, Malta, and Nemesis. I don't know how much stealth is needed there, only that I've never gotten there. In short, Invisibility doesn't offer enough to justify taking it as a second dip in that pool, and the other powers in Concealment (Grant Invisibility, Phase Shift, Misdirection) don't seem to be all that popular now either. We now have a power pool whose entire benefit stops at the first tier. That isn't all that rare among pool powers. Some kind of buff to Invisibility in PvE would appear to be called for. Making its concealment strong enough to get you past snipers and mobs with +Perception would appear to be the obvious improvement for the higher tier power. I suspect this could be done without mucking around with PvP too much, since the powers seem to work entirely differently there.

I do enjoy my electric/electric blaster. But Power Sink in the secondary is the number one endurance draining tool; the drains in Electric Blast are only a supplement.

Tina Turner - One of the Living

I don't respec very often either. I tend to forget to leave stuff out when I do respec, especially stuff like travel powers. Some characters are created with a view towards endgame usefulness. More, though, are whole game characters, that do fine when exemped down to run a Synapse because they have the best powers available for the level when they do. I will use catalysts on enhancements I want available at the broadest level spectrum; usually this means Numina and Miracle if nothing else. The only characters I have respecced on Homecoming were my Archery/Devices blaster, to get rid of Time Bomb, and a scrapper where I wanted to reassign her enhancements to different powers.

Imagined Village - Cold Haily Rainy Night (live)

They work for me. I often have to crank the gamma way up when I play on my Intel laptop so I can see where the doors and entrances are in sewers, Oranbega, and the like.